It’s difficult to ignore the calls by the medical community to be aware. A virus called “mpox” is exploding in the world and the UN has declared it an international public health emergency. So far, 13 countries have registered its spread, with an apparent epicenter in Congo where 96% of all cases and deaths are recorded. In Canada, 225 confirmed cases have already been reported. But what is mpox? It’s a euphemism for “monkey pox”, a zoonotically transmitted virus from monkeys that affects almost exclusively men who have sex with other men, expressing itself as lesions in the genital areas. “All we have to do,” said one medical official in the Republic of Congo, “is to tell men to stop having gay sex.” As was expected, he was quickly shut down amidst a barrage of condemnations that his language prejudices the homosexual population. Instead, there is now an international advisory for everyone to take the mpox vaccine. Yes, everyone. Instead of providing specific medical advisory to the homosexual population, the message is to the entire population without any medical basis that the disease is communicable among the heterosexual population. And as a result, the message is going out at snail’s pace. One Baptist minister in Africa called it “a moral problem creating a medical confusion.”
Herein lies the problem. The propaganda that encases gay behaviour as normal now works against those who are most vulnerable to a dangerous disease. We are intimidated by a chorus of voices that silence the voice of repentance from sin, and danger now crouches at the door. It’s not a new problem. 2,600 years before our time, Isaiah lived in the courts of his friend King Uzziah who turned from God to a haughty disregard for all things godly. Isaiah recorded the happenings at court with the words, “I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). The word “dwell” is curious. It means “to sit down, to marry oneself to”. Isaiah’s confession is clear: he hung out in the courts of his friend Uzziah as the moral devolution happened around him, and he said nothing. The result was that his friend was infected with the most devastating disease of that day – leprosy. And its spread was so rapid that Uzziah died in short measure. God points Isaiah away from his silence and asks, “Who shall I send?” His enigmatic response was, “Here am I, send me.” 600 years after Isaiah, Jesus came on the scene. He called out sin as it was; He called for repentance rather than covering it up. He pointed the way to salvation, a way back to the Kingdom of Heaven. Then He said to us sitting in the courts of public opinion, “As the Father sent Me, so send I you.” So let this be our “Isaiah moment”. It’s time to be courageous in speaking up about righteousness. It’s time to point people wandering into demise to the One who saves them. Let’s not “dwell” among them. Let’s introduce them to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Just Church
In the midst of moral confusion, we need to be His church. “The vision of Just Church is to establish a church in just the way Christ called the church to be – true to His Word, loving Him, loving one another, and loving the lost.”
